


Endurance

by chicago_ruth



Category: GreedFall (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Forced Orgasm, Gang Rape, Humiliation, M/M, Suffering, Tears, Whipping, Whump, unwanted arousal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:01:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21891814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicago_ruth/pseuds/chicago_ruth
Summary: Vasco doesn't expect to get accosted by former crew mates; he doesn't expect to be whipped; he doesn't expect it to get worse than that.He has to endure. He can't show weakness.(M/M noncon, read at your own discretion.)
Relationships: Male Thugs/Vasco, Vasco/male De Sardet
Comments: 13
Kudos: 56





	Endurance

**Author's Note:**

> Heed the tags. Vasco/male de Sardet established relationship, but hints of (unrequited?) Constantin/de Sardet.

The only thing Vasco wants to do when they get back to New Serene is relax with de Sardet. Unfortunately, as soon as they walk past the stairs to the Governor’s mansion, de Sardet stops and looks up.

“Do you think he’s doing all right? He’s been looking so exhausted lately. And he’s had so much stress—"

“He’s fine,” Kurt says brusquely. “Come on, we’re all tired.”

The others grumble too, but it’s clear that de Sardet can’t let it go. Vasco takes a deep breath, mostly to bury his annoyance, and then he bumps de Sardet’s shoulder with his own. “It’s clear you’re worried. Why don’t you go visit him. We’ll meet you back at your residence.”

De Sardet smiles gratefully at him. “Thank you so much, Vasco.” He kisses Vasco briefly, just a quick goodbye peck, and then he’s rushing up the stairs.

“He really needs to let Constantin figure out his own problems for once,” Kurt mutters. Nobody else says anything, either out of respect for de Sardet or because nobody disagrees.

Vasco can’t say he doesn’t feel jealous, but he tells himself that it’s not his place to judge, and that he doesn’t really know what it’s like to have a sibling. He has called some of the other Nauts brothers, but he knows it isn’t the same. They weren’t raised together, they didn’t rely solely on each other.

From what de Sardet has told him in private, growing up in the palace wasn’t without its own pain either. He might never had had to risk his life climbing ropes or endure long weeks of rationed food, but even the palace came with hardship.

Since his evening is now free, Vasco excuses himself from the others to head back to the docks. He wants to catch up with Admiral Cabral, and to check in with his old crew. They might no longer work for him, but he still thinks fondly of them.

He takes a shortcut to the docks, and nods at the people he passes. He sees a group of Nauts up ahead, and doesn’t parse them as a threat until they surround him. He tenses when he realizes that he recognizes some of them—and not in a good way. These are men he served on ships with in the past, before he started rising in the ranks. All male, most of them around his own age.

“Carlos. Hello,” Vasco says carefully. His hand drifts down to his sword, although he doesn’t want to get into a fight here. He looks around the alley, and grimaces when he realizes it really is just them here. They’re only five, but he doesn’t like the odds, especially in a tight alley like this. He doesn’t have room to maneuver, and they won’t give him the time he needs to set up his poisons.

Carlos grins at him, wide and nasty. “If it isn’t Captain Vasco. What brings you back to these seedier parts of town? Heard you got a nice, cushy assignment. Was captain not a good enough title for you?”

Cushy assignment? Vasco has no idea what they’re talking about, until it clicks: they mean his order to accompany de Sardet.

“It’s fine. If you’ll excuse me, I have plans.” He tries to brush past the group, but Carlos grabs him by the shoulder. Out of reflex, Vasco jabs his elbow backwards, and he catches Carlos off guard, right in the stern.

But that’s the end of peaceable talk. The others rush at him and grab his limbs. Vasco draws his sword, but one of the others slams his hand hard, making him drop it.

“You think you can escape? You think you’re better than us?” One of them says.

Right now? Yes, Vasco thinks he’s better than them. He’s not stupid enough to say it, and _better_ doesn’t mean _stronger_ , not when it’s five against one. If he’d had time to prepare, it might have been doable, but their grip on him is tight. One of them picks up a rope that was set on a barrel, and that’s when Vasco realizes this wasn’t an accident.

They’ve been waiting for him.

He does his best to make it difficult for them to tie the ropes. He figures any leeway he can get will make it easier to escape later.

“Whose bright idea was this, then? You think you’ll win favors with Admiral Cabral? With the governor?” Vasco threatens.

Carlos slaps him across the face. “Shut the fuck up. We don’t need Cabral’s favor. And we’re Nauts, we don’t give a damn about the governor or the merchants or that annoying little _legate of the congregation._ ” The said that last word in a poor mockery of de Sardet’s voice. It shouldn’t have bothered Vasco, he should have brushed it off the way he always brushed off insults to himself, but apparently being in love meant caring too much about somebody else’s reputation.

He keeps his mouth shut though, and ignores the sting on his cheek and the way the ropes start digging into him. He spits in their faces when they come close and attempt to gag him, for all the good it does him. He still ends up with a heavy cloth stuffed into his mouth and tied around his head. His hat ends up discarded on the alley floor, lost to the struggle.

“You’re going to fucking regret that,” the man he spat on says. He wipes the spit off with the back of his hand, and then rubs the hand against Vasco’s face.

All of Vasco’s attempts to escape do nothing. They drag him into an empty building a few streets down—some sort of warehouse. It isn’t a Naut warehouse though; there’d be far more patrols, and Vasco is sure he knows and is friendly with most of the warehouse staff.

When Vasco sees the post with the metal hooks in the middle of the room, his stomach sinks. He knows exactly what happens in a room like this. His breathing starts coming in faster, even though he knows he has to stay calm. He can’t think if he’s panicking, and he needs to think if he wants to escape.

“Take his clothes off,” Carlos orders.

“This is gonna be fun,” somebody else says.

Vasco digs his feet into the ground and tries to keep his hands close to himself, but once again, their numbers overwhelm him. The gag muffles his shouts. He does manage to kick somebody in the shin, and he thinks he catches somebody in the pelvis—there’s definitely a loud cry—but they force him onto his knees and slice his clothes off him.

When they have him completely naked, rags and boots kicked to the side, they unwind the rope around him and bind it around just his arms. This they attach it to the hooks on the pole. He’s forced to brace against the pole, and for a brief moment he’s not in this warehouse, he isn’t an adult and a captain in his own right. He’s a teenager, tied to the ship’s mast and being reprimanded for his failures.

He blinks, and it’s Carlos in front of him, not their former captain. Carlos is holding a whip though, much like their old captain did. “You thought you could sleep your way out of the Nauts?” Carlos sneers at him.

No, that isn’t what he’s doing. He loves de Sardet; he loves the man’s thoughtful word and the way he attempts to find peaceful solutions for everything and how respectful he is and how much he cares. Vasco has never met a man as extraordinary as de Sardet.

Vasco resists the urge to shake his head. Nothing he does will change anybody’s mind at this point, so he resolves to bear it, just as he did every other time he got whipped. He glares back at Carlos, and wills him to just get it over with already.

“Yeah, you always were a defiant bitch like that. We’ll beat it out of you yet,” Carlos sneer at him. Then he disappears out of Vasco’s line of site.

“Get on with it,” one of the other Nauts says. There’s some disagreement between them, which gives Vasco a false sense of reprieve.

He doesn’t expect the first lash, and it draws a groan out of him. Fuck. Fuck. It hurts. It’s been a long time since he took the whip, and he doesn’t miss being familiar with this pain.

The gag, at least, keeps his shouts muffled. He bites down on it hard and tenses himself against the next lash. He knows it’s better to relax his muscles, but it’s a reflex. His shoulders burn where the end of it hits, and he gets no reprieve before it pulls back and hits him again, this time much lower.

He counts the strokes inside his mind, out of habit, mostly. It also helps to keep him grounded a bit. Five lashes so far. He doesn’t know how many he’s going to receive, but as long as it’s _less_ than the last time he was whipped, he’ll survive. He can survive, he knows he can survive, he _has_ to survive.

De Sardet needs him.

It’s a bit hard to breathe, though, with the gag in his mouth and his nose starting to stuff up. Tears form in the corners of his eyes. He wishes he knew how to stop the tears, but he’s never been able to keep from crying during a whipping. The only thing he can do is blink against the tears and tell himself that everybody cries.

The next blow—lash number nine—hits him on the thighs.

The pain is so intense that he stumbles forward, knocking his head against the post and rubbing his bare skin against the rope. Fuck. He didn’t think Carlos would go there. The panic settles deeper into his bones, and it’s becoming harder and harder to stay still.

Because the moment the whip pulls back, when he has that one bit of reprieve from the pain—that’s when his body decides that actually, this feels good. The sharp pain flows into a relieved pleasure, and Vasco hates it, hates that his body decides to like this. Hates that his cock twitches.

The next lash is lower still, and then another one further up his back. Now it isn’t just a matter of bracing against the pain, but against the pleasure too. The tears become worse, not just a product of pain, but of humiliation.

This happened in the past too, but at least he’d been clothed then and only the captain had really noticed.

He hopes none of the.. the _thugs_ —they don’t deserve to be called Nauts, they’re common thugs—notice, but his luck isn’t that good.

“Fuck me, he’s getting off on this,” one of them says. The whip stops, and in the sudden quiet, Vasco can hear all the soft sounds he thought he’d been suppressing, his sniffled breaths and pained groans.

“You serious?” Carlos asks. There’s the sound of the whip dropping, and Carlos comes in closer and runs his hands over Vasco’s heated skin. He palms Vasco’s bruised ass and digs his thumbs into the sides.

It shouldn’t feel good. Vasco’s mind is repulsed, but every touch sparks pleasure through him, and by the time Carlos removes his disgusting hands, he’s hard and leaking.

“What the fuck?” Carlos says. “You some kind of freak? Did you get off on it every time the captain whipped you, too? Is that why you were in trouble so much?”

No. The captain hated him for a completely different reason. Or rather: the captain enjoyed seeing Vasco in pain and humiliated, and he made Vasco attend to him in his cabin afterwards. He would tend to Vasco’s bruises and compliment him on taking it so well, on being such a good boy; he’d say that all of this hurt him more than Vasco, and Vasco couldn’t do anything but sob and hope for the day when he got assigned to a different ship.

Carlos’s fingers stray towards Vasco’s hole and rub insistently there. “Blessed sea, you’ve been sleeping your way to the top since day one. Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have a turn at that ass. Everybody else has.”

Vasco jerks his arms by accident, and all that gets him is the rope digging into his flesh some more. He has to stop struggling. It’ll only make things worse. He knows this, he’s been through this before.

He hears Carlos spitting into his hand, and some of the other thugs egging him on. Then there’s a blunt pressure against his hole.

It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it does. It’s nothing, really, compared to the whipping. But the spit barely makes a difference, and there isn’t enough sweat—or blood?—on his body to make up the difference either.

This is actually new. He can honestly say he has never experienced this, and once Carlos is fully seated, his body flush against Vasco’s and making his back and thighs flare up with pain once more, Vasco can only think that he’d have liked to go his entire life without knowing this pain.

“Ream him good, Carlos!”

“Loosen him up for us! But not too loose!”

They all laugh.

Fuck. Vasco bites down hard on the gag again. His mouth is starting to feel dry, and the humiliated tears just won’t fucking stop. He needs this to be over.

When this is all over, he’s going to kill these men. He doesn’t usually consider himself violent, but he’ll make an exception. Nobody will miss them. The Nauts will be better off without having these dishonorable thugs in their ranks.

Carlos starts moving, thrusting in and out. It doesn’t take long for him to come, at least, although Vasco hates knowing that he has this man’s seed inside him now.

When Carlos pulls back, some of that seed trickles down Vasco’s thighs. There are more hoots, more laughter, and then next man steps up to take his turn.

It’s numbing. That’s all Vasco can really say. He doesn’t want to think about what’s happening, so he doesn’t. The pain continues, and the disgust threatens to make bile rise in his throat, but he ignores whatever they’re saying. It doesn’t matter.

He just needs to endure.

Maybe it would have worked, if one of them hadn’t wrapped a hand around Vasco’s erection. Vasco cries out and starts struggling again, which elicits more laughter.

He tries to say “don’t!” and a “please!” comes out too, and it’s so fucking lucky that he’s gagged. He wouldn’t have been able to handle the humiliation of actually begging. But it doesn’t stop arousal from slamming into him, and the guy jerking him off is standing to the side and leering at Vasco the entire time.

“Fuck, that’s hot. Look at him crying. But he wants it. He’s so flushed.”

No, no, no. He just wants it to be over.

As hard as he tries, he can’t stave off orgasm. He sobs as he comes, spilling all over the other man. There’s somebody inside him still, so he gets no reprieve. His entire body is oversensitized. Everything hurts, everything feels good.

He can’t tell how much time has passed anymore, and if he weren’t tied to the post he would fall to the floor. But, finally, the thugs have decided they’ve had enough.

“Remember this, the next time you think you’re better than the rest of us.” Carlos slaps his ass one more time, and then unwinds the rope from around Vasco’s hands.

He does collapse, his knees hitting the floor hard, and then he slips entirely to the floor. He wants to get up, but he has no energy.

“Explain that to your fucking legate,” Carlos says. He spits one last time, and it lands on Vasco’s side. Then he and the rest of the thugs leave.

It would be so easy to fall asleep here. Vasco’s exhausted. He doesn’t want to deal with the world. But he wants even less to be discovered like this, so he forces himself to get onto his knees. As he suspected, his wrists are red and raw. There’s blood on his thighs.

His jaw hurts when he removes the gag, and the first thing he does is take a long breath. It’s not the relief he wants it to be, but there’s no time to recover more.

Vasco has to crawl over to his clothes, and despairs at the state they’re in. He can’t wear these. At least the shirt works as a rag, and he grimaces when the fabric, which had seemed high quality before, is akin to burlap against his skin now.

The boots are still in good shape. He can wear the boots. For the rest—he looks around the room, and crawls to a nearby chest. It isn’t locked, thank the sea, and inside is a stack of shirts. Vasco ignores the pain and pulls one on. It’s too big, but he’s okay with that.

Another chest yields trousers, and that’s good enough.

Worse than putting on all the clothes is actually standing up. He stumbles and has to use the post for leverage. It takes him another few breaths to find his balance.

One step. Two steps.

He’s dismayed to see that it’s properly dark by now. He blinks against more frustrated tears, but that’s pathetic. He isn’t the young lad on the ship anymore, without recourse. He’ll find a way to get his revenge.

He can’t go to Admiral Cabral though. If it had been just the whipping—but he doesn’t want her to know about this.

It takes him almost three times as long as usual to get back to de Sardet’s residence. Everybody is already in their own rooms, for which he’s thankful. He’d love nothing more than to head to de Sardet’s bedroom and collapse into the bed, but the thought of de Sardet seeing him in this state makes him shudder. No. De Sardet needs him to be strong.

So he knocks on Siora’s door, and is thankful that she opens the door rather than making him do it. He has to lean against the wall to stay upright.

“Vasco? What—What happened to you?” Siora grabs Vasco’s wrist, and he hisses in pain. She lets go immediately.

“Sorry. Do you think you could… do some of your magic? Just enough to patch me up a bit.”

“Yes, but—” Siora grimaces. “Yes, of course. One moment.”

She does her native magic, and it’s a nice, cool sensation that prickles across Vasco’s skin. It doesn’t cure him completely, but it’s enough to ease the pain and let him stand up straighter.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “Please don’t tell the others about this.”

“What? If somebody hurt you, we need to—”

“No!” he hisses. “It was just some thugs. I’ll take care of it myself. De Sardet has enough on his plate right now.”

Siora doesn’t look like she agrees, but finally she huffs. “Fine. But Vasco, I think de Sardet would want to know. You are his _minundhanem_.”

“Maybe.” Vasco pushes off from the wall. “Thank you again. Good night.”

She waits another beat before closing the door.

* * *

He gets a servant to draw a bath for him, and he uses a cloth to scrub himself as clean as he can. He can still feel a layer of dirt on him even after the third cloth comes back clean, but he knows that’s just in his head.

Then he settles into the warm, clear water and lets it soothe his hurts. He found some bath salts in his pack and mixed them with the water, which helps tremendously. Between that and Siora’s magic, he’s feeling not on the verge of death.

It was stupid. He shouldn’t have gone out alone. He’s been too complacent, lately. Relying too much on de Sardet and the others, and completely forgetting that having a crew doesn’t make him invincible. He’ll have to find a reason for them to track down Carlos and his band. He can make up a story about Naut traitors, and then enjoy seeing de Sardet obliterate all of them with a few well-timed spells.

He’s still in the water when de Sardet returns.

De Sardet looks exhausted. “Vasco. You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

“My tempest,” Vasco says carefully. “Are you feeling all right?”

De Sardet shrugs and starts undressing. “Yes. No. I mean—can I join you?”

The water is somewhat lukewarm, and the tub isn’t exactly made for two grown men, but Vasco nods and shifts to make room. He bites down a hiss when his back hits the edge of the tub.

“What happened?” Vasco asks. He feels a bit hollow, saying those words. He wraps his arms around de Sardet’s shoulders and blinks hard against the strange itchiness in his eyes.

“Constantin is—I don’t know. He says he’s fine, but I know he’s not. We had a good chat, except some of what he said…. I think I’m being overprotective, maybe. I don’t trust that the malichor is truly gone though. And he doesn’t seem quite like himself. The coup attempt has made him so paranoid.”

De Sardet goes on, laying out his worries about Constantin, and each word seems to dig into one of Vasco’s wounds.

_Stop talking about him. I’m the one suffering. I’m the one in pain._

But he doesn’t want to risk de Sardet looking at him differently. So Vasco holds him, and listens to his woes, and pretends he’s perfectly fine.

Because he is. He’s fine.


End file.
